It is Memorial Day in the United States. Once again, we remember those who have died in wars. We pay tribute to them for their sacrifice. We say those standard things they died for you and me. Their selfless sacrifice made the freedom we enjoy today possible.

But when shall we say farewell to arms? Below are what some writers of war literature said about war. It is from my essay, War Literature.

In wars, there is a strange relationship between creation and destruction. It is never lost on the writer. War destroys the old while creating the new. It does the same on an individual level. Most often the writer sees this and is very critical of it. Hemingway did this in the following passage from A Farewell to Arms:

“I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice. . . . We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it.

There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.”

In Vietnam, where martyrdom met senseless sacrifice, Tim O’Brien captured its useless ness. Reviewing Going After Cacciato in the New York Times, Richard Freedman described it as a book that reminds us of Hemingway. Like Hemingway’s Frederic Henry and his team of ambulance drivers, Paul Berlin and his fellow soldiers were at a loss as to why they were fighting:

“[They had] no beliefs. They did not know even the simple things: a sense of victory, or satisfaction, or necessary sacrifice. They did not know the feeling of taking a place and keeping it, securing a village and then raising the flag and calling it a victory. No sense of order or momentum. No front, no rear, no trenches laid out in neat parallels. No Patton rushing for the Rhine, no beachheads to storm and win and hold for the duration. They did not have targets. They did not have a cause. They did not know if it was a war of ideology or economics or hegemony or spite.”

“On a given day, they did not know where they were in Quang Ngai, or how being there might influence larger outcomes. They did not know the names of most villages. They did not know which villages were critical. They did not know strategies. They did not know the terms of the war, its architecture, the rules of fair play. When they took prisoners, which was rare, they did not know the questions to ask, whether to release a suspect or beat on him.

They did not know how to feel. Whether, when seeing a dead Vietnamese, to be happy or sad or relieved; whether, in times of quiet, to be apprehensive or contend, whether to engage the enemy or elude him. They did not know how to feel when they saw villages burning. Revenge, Loss of Peace of mind or anguish? They did not know. They knew the old myths of Quang Ngai — tales passed down from old-timer to newcomer — but they did not know which stories to believe. Magic, mystery, ghosts and incense, whispers in the dark, strange tongues and strange smells, uncertainties never articulated in war stories, emotion squandered on ignorance. They did not know good from evil.”

Central to the writer’s interpretation of war in literature has always been the question of what purpose. Tim O’Brien presented this in his exposition of Lt. Sidney Martin’s dilemma.

“But he [LT Martin] was not stupid. He knew something was wrong with his war. The absence of common purpose. He would rather have fought his battles in France or at Hastings or Austerlitz. He would rather have fought at St. Vith. But the lieutenant knew that in war purpose is never paramount, neither purpose nor cause, and that battles are always fought among human beings, not purposes. He could not imagine dying for a purpose. Death was its own purpose, no qualification or restraint. He did not celebrate war. He did not believe in glory.

But he recognized the enduring appeal of battle: the chance to confront death many times, as often as there were battles. Secretly the lieutenant believed that war had been invented for just that reason — so that through repetition men might try to do better, so that be learned and applied the next time, so that men might not be robbed of their own deaths. In this sense alone, Sidney Martin believed in war as a means to ends. A means of confronting ending itself, many repeated endings.”

Happy Memorial Day.